


Wake of Madness

by Flitty



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Character Death, Evil Voldemort (Harry Potter), Except Maybe Umbridge, Hogwarts Fifth Year, No Bashing, Sort Of, character fusion
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-26
Updated: 2021-02-23
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:34:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24395851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flitty/pseuds/Flitty
Summary: Harry frees himself during Voldemort’s resurrection, and promptly sacrifices himself to sabotage the ritual. What results is something else entirely.Or, more accurately, someONE else.
Relationships: Harry Potter & Tom Riddle | Voldemort
Comments: 9
Kudos: 33
Collections: Harry and Voldemort





	1. Sacrifice

Harry struggles against the ropes tying him, and the ones on his left wrist, already ragged from Wormtail's shuddering knifework, start to pull apart under the strain. Crimson drips faster than ever from his torn flesh, but he swallows resolutely and ignores it, pulling the hand free, the snapping sounds overruled by the deafening sizzle of Voldemort's cauldron.

His legs aren't tied. All that's holding him back now is his right arm. His wand is on the floor, he won't be able to reach it until he's free.

He pulls the cloth gag from his mouth to mutter the Severing Charm, clawing his right hand to touch the ropes with his fingertips. He's surprised when they actually fray a little.

He presses his feet against Tom Riddle Sr's gravestone and braces, wrenching his right arm from the ropes.

Something snaps, and if the lightning strike of pain is anything to go by, it isn't just the binding. He hisses under his breath, unheard by the servant so focussed on his master's impending rebirth.

A roll to regain his footing and Harry's free.

He almost stoops for his wand on instinct, but it'd be useless. He can't cast left-handed, and his right couldn't hold a sheet of parchment right now, much less a wand.

Instead, he barrels on shaking, leaden legs towards the cauldron. Wormtail, caught by surprise as he nurses his bloody wrist, dodges out of the way as his self-preservation instincts kick in, leaving Harry with a clear shot towards the sparking, fizzling concoction.

It's clearly too sturdy to topple.

Harry's stride almost breaks as the hope drains from his body, but desperation rushes in to fill its place and he plants his foot into the soft earth as his mind forms an appropriately ill-thought-out plan.

There are two easy ways to ruin a potion:

Spill it.

Or contaminate it.

One option taken from him, Harry picks the other.

The graveyard explodes into brimstone and agony.

* * *

Something's different.

There's someone else there.

HaTomrry

And then something else.

Are these... tears?

He wipes them away irritably. It wouldn't do for a teendarkagerlord to be seen crying.

More tears take their place.

Unbidden, memories arise. They shouldn't. They're not importantnot his.

He buries them away, dragging a hand over his eyes again, and returns to reality: Dissipating smoke. The graveyard. And a short, pathetic man with a missing hand.

Fury splits his skull.

A curse dances on his lips, green light plays in his mind's eye - but no. That would be wrong. Wormtail owes far more than his mere life is worth. He's a traitor. An incompetent. A coward. He caused this.

He's useful. He fears, and he obeys.

Or faces the consequences.

"Wormtail," he rasps, putting as much contempt into the name as his newly-created vocal chords can possibly muster. The man cringes and curls in on himself, cradling his bleeding stump, and he finds his lips curling unpleasantly.

A memory - a relevant one this time - stirs. Voldemort promised this waste of burnable material a new hand, in the event that he regained his body.

Which did not happen.

Harry's soaking wet, too-big Triwizard outfit swamps his form. He steps from the trousers, leaving just the red and black shirt, which now goes down to his knees. The wind blows chilly despite the late month, but he doesn't care to acknowledge his human weaknesses.

Slowly, savoringly, he flexes his tiny, skinny arms. Raises one child-sized leg from the liquid pooled in the cauldron, then the other. Then, with grace that only a part of him usually possesses, he takes a gigantic yet perfectly-practiced step out of the cauldron, one foot meeting the particulate dirt below, then the other joining it a moment later.

His - Harry's - wand lays where he left it. An inexplicable warmth spreads through his chest at the sight, and he reverently reaches down and takes it into his hand.

It accepts him, warm, bright and golden as always, and he sighs in relief.

"My wand," he murmurs icily, both in acknowledgement and as a prompt. Wormtail holds out his - Tom's, Voldemort's - wand, and it's torn from his remaining hand with an _Accio_ , with enough force to damage the rat's fingers.

Silver, serpentine, mercurial. Acceptance.

He nods in satisfaction, flicking it negligently at Wormtail's whimpering form. The wound seals itself with a solid, heavy block of stone shaped like a roughly-hewn fist. Let Wormtail deal with the consequences of his plentiful errors.

A wave of lethargy overtakes him: backlash from casting a high-level spell from such a new body, no doubt. He ignores it, refusing to show weakness to a man who only serves out of fear.

"My- My Lord," Wormtail presses, eyes flicking between him and the inanimate hand in growing dread. "You p-promised, you did-"

"You failed me, Wormtail," he cuts in softly, advancing with deliberate, unmistakable menace. Dark pleasure surges through him as Wormtail somehow contorts to make himself appear even smaller without falling over. "You left the ritual unguarded. You jeopardised my rebirth. Be thankful I don't cut you down where you stand."

He inspects his wands, holly and yew brothers, seriously considering doing just that. Unfortunately his Slytherin rationality wins out. Wormtail is an asset, and as one of two servants who know of Voldemort's return, an important one at that.

With two wands in hand and dressed in a drenched sports shirt, he gestures for the rat to follow him and begins making his way towards the Riddle house.

* * *

Small mercies, Wormtail can make the bed so he's not sleeping on sheets last used by dead people. And he can use that time alone to figure out how Harry's sabotage altered the ritual.

And shower. Being coated in potion remnant is not a particularly pleasant sensation at the best of times.

A cold feeling of alienation washes over him when he sees his face in the mirror. It isn't one he recognises. The contours are different. Too young, round, unmarred by the lightning bolt scar. Too _charming, frigid Tom_ , yet at the same time too _loyal, aggressive Harry_. Even the hair is strange: short and raven-black as usual, but oxymoronically messy in a way that seems purposeful and deliberate.

Just who is he?

The ritual must have had a similar effect to its original purpose. The whole point of rituals is how deep they delve into the specifics - the further into a ritual you are, the less changes when you alter a step, and when Harry intervened the ritual was nearing completion. So theoretically, his soul was strengthened and then reborn in a body that reflected the strengthened form, as the ritual was meant to do.

He's glad that Tom took the extra caution of altering the step order. Voldemort's version defines the vague workings of a magical body first, contains the soul and magic within the body, and _then_ constructs the actual features of the body in tandem with empowering the soul. It seems that the latter two processes were corrupted by the introduction of Harry's soul and body. Had it been the original ritual, both souls would have been irreversibly garbled, cursed to an existence that even Voldemort would find too chilling to risk.

Hence the altered ritual.

He frowns at his reflection. The eyes are wrong. They're supposed to be Avada greenStunner red. But instead, they're the green-yellow-orange of early-Autumn leaves.

He sighs, unbuttoning Harry's potion-remnant-laden shirt and letting it fall to the floor with a grimace. Might as well check his body for unforeseen flaws before his shower-

Oh.

_She_ borrows Ron's thesaurus for the next ten minutes.

* * *

Harriet.

No, no, of course not. It's blindingly obvious. She already looks too similar to Harry. Even when disrupted, rituals leave long-lasting traces that can then be followed to determine roughly the ritual's effects, so if someone named Harriet appears from nowhere who looks near-identical to Harry Potter give or take a few years, it could be suspicious enough for people to piece things together.

It isn't likely with the current state of the Ministry, but then caution isn't _for_ the likely.

She shivers, rolling in place under the bed's covers, and bunches them up underneath her to keep her body-heat in. A holdover from Harry's nights spent sleeping on a hard mattress in a drafty cupboard. She snorts in combined amusement and irritation at the suddenly vivid image of Lord Voldemort doing the same.

Tom. That's a better starting point. Voldemort is believed dead and has been for more than a decade now, few people know his real name, and those who do are both tight-lipped and believe (correctly) that Voldemort despised that name with every fibre of his being.

He's- She's loathe to use it. But she's also awful at naming things, Hedwig and Nagini the only flimsy testaments to the contrary, and it's uncharacteristic enough of Voldemort to make a good cover.

What variations does the name Tom have?

Tommie.

...No. Absolutely not. That's even more repugnant than Tom. Is that even a feminine name? Isn't there a muggle gun called that?

Tomantha? An unnatural bastardisation of a name that no loving and competent parent would ever curse their child with, and an homage to Voldemort's name so obviously contrived that Dumbledore would connect them in an instant. She'd be at wand's point the moment they shared a room. A little more subtlety is required.

Tamara. That's... better, actually.

It's just distant enough from Tom to avoid drawing attention to the similarity, but just close enough that Voldemort would refuse to use it out of principle.

Tamara... actually doesn't hate it. In fact, she quite enjoys how it rolls off the tongue. The emphasis on the second syllable gives an air of casual, effortless importance that Tom might have appreciated were it not for the link to his name (not that that matters with Tamara calling the shots), and it has just enough in common with Harry's name to make her feel...

Her.

Tamara.

There are certainly worse names to have.

She lets out a voiceless yawn, curling further into the warmth of her bed. The surname can come later. For now, she's just Tamara.

She doesn't dream, and it's a welcome respite.

* * *

When a glass explodes under her fingers two days later, Tamara blinks rapidly despite her sudden void of energy.

The same thing happened to Aunt Marge's glass before Third Year, when she pushed Harry just a little too far, Tamara recalls. So Tamara's angry? Stressed?

Why?

She's just lying low, biding her time until the disappearance and presumed death of the Boy Who Lived blows over. It's hardly a new experience, for Harry or for Tom.

So why is this time so difficult?

"Wormtail, clean that up," she orders dispassionately. Her voice, higher and softer than Tom's ever was now that she's listening for it, regardless cuts through the silence like sharpened steel.

She rises from her seat at the empty, water-damaged twelve-person dining table, brushing shards of glass off the robes that Wormtail poorly transfigured for her. Without a second glance she sends a mild stinging hex at her procrastinating underling, earning a surprised yelp for her troubles, and strides into the hallway, intent on returning to her bedroom.

The front door beckons.

...

She just wants to go out?! Is _that_ why she broke the glass?

She tears her gaze away from the clouded window and growls at her own childishness. Her _life_ is at stake here! Dumbledore is even now scouring the country for the slightest trace of either Harry or Tom, and Tamara bears far more than a mere trace. She _cannot_ afford to leave the safety of the Riddle House. And certainly not as an act of whimsy!

Her eyes wander back to the inviting daylight, a fanciful promise of escape from this oppressive, haunting abode.

Fanciful, and deceitful.

She spins on her heel and marches for the stairs before she can convince herself to do otherwise.

* * *

Ten days.

Ten days in this Merlin-forsaken building, and _seventeen shattered glasses_.

She's even taken out the living-room windows four times, andon the seventh day every _single window she passed_ became collateral damage - by the end of the day, she was almost comatose from magical exhaustion. If this keeps up, she'll probably end up dead before she can... well... figure out what she's going to do.

Wormtail is no better at the reparation charm than he was ten days ago, but it certainly isn't for lack of practice.

She needs to calm her magic, and the only way to do that is by taking her mind off the fact that she's trapped in a mansion-shaped box.

She tries to relive her memories as Voldemort and Harry, to piece them together, but she gives it up as a lost cause - as Tom's memories blend into Voldemort's, they become shattered, faded and useless, little more than gut feelings and so laden with deja vu that she can't be certain if they ever actually happened.

Harry's memories, and Tom's from before Voldemort, are... well, exactly as she remembers them. There's no great mystery surrounding them, no signs of _Obliviation_ or a need to set everything straight in her mind. They're just _there_ , to be called upon as needed, just as they were for Harry and Tom.

In short, they won't help with the whole exploding glass problem.

The great outdoors is off-limits. She can't afford to be discovered before the inevitable hunt for Harry dies down. Surely there's _something_ in this house to occupy her in the meantime?

_Accio_. No books, not even ones on muggle subjects. If there ever were any here, they were likely taken by the mould. Hermione wouldn't last a day here, Tamara thinks with a smirk.

_Accio_. No brooms (at least not magical ones), not that she expected a muggle manor to have them unless Tom himself put them there. There goes Ron's sanity, if he ever visits. He'd still have his food addiction to keep him company though, so out of the trio, he'd probably take the longest to go completely mad.

Well, assuming Tamara didn't start off that way. With the Dark Lord Voldemort as one constituent, his archenemy as the other, and her current status as Bane of Glass, that isn't something she's willing to bet money on.

She could probably _Imperio_ Wormtail for some entertainment. Make him tap-dance on the table or something. It wouldn't even be especially harmful... but she's still recovering from the ritual, and the accidental magic is not helping on that front. Overexerting her magic probably isn't the best idea for now, especially given the corruption. Otherwise she'd feel no remorse for it.

The front door beckons, and Tamara ignores it. How hard can it be to wait a few weeks more?

Tamara has a sinking feeling that she knows the answer to that.

* * *

Her resolve lasts all of three more days before her hand is forced. If willpower were her only concern she'd have probably managed another few days, but unfortunately the bodycount for the Riddle House's windows is rising exponentially, and her energy reserves are draining in kind. If she can't find a way to bring her magic back under control, not only will attention be drawn to the Riddle House, but any investigators would find her prone and vulnerable, if not posthumous.

Slowly, helplessly succumbing to magical exhaustion must be a truly awful way to go. She shudders.

If anything is right in the world, finding something to _do_ outside will be just what she needs to reign in her magic.

But even if she's leaving the house, she will not tolerate undue risk.

Peter Pettigrew is a dead man who Dumbledore knows is in league with Voldemort, and they don't have reliable access to spells or potions to alter his appearance. Not without involving other Death Eaters, whose reactions to Tamara will be too unpredictable to face without heavy preparation. So Wormtail stays in the house.

Good. As it is, she's a constant hair's-breadth away from cursing the snivelling coward to oblivion.

Which wouldn't be an issue, if only she had other servants available to fill the vacancy.

Leaving Wormtail behind does leave Tamara entirely unguarded, but it's either that or risk someone recognising the rat. Besides, Tamara may look young, but she has almost twenty years of experience getting around as a muggle (-ish) child, and several more _decades_ of magical experience on top of that. Even in her weakened state, she is a far cry from the easy target that any would-be assailant might envision.

And it isn't as if she'll march straight up to Hogwarts itself, or even to Hogsmead or Diagon, as tempting as the magical villages are. No, she's going where Dumbledore would never think to search for Voldemort, even if he suspected he were alive: the muggle world.

Just on a day-trip. A chance to see more than just the walls of a dilapidated, damp-marked manor, and potentially to explode with accidental magic in a location that she can afford to place under additional scrutiny. Perhaps buy a book or two to prevent an encore of the past two weeks.

After pulling on another transfigured set of clothes - this time a generic, ill-fitting school uniform (with trousers; Wormtail doesn't seem to realise she's female) to blend in, as today is a Monday - Tamara fastens an empty rucksack to her back for appearances' sake, checks her pockets for the £250 in notes that she deigned to bring along, and pushes the door-

It's a pull door.

Ow.

Forehead against the glass, Tamara listens to the clatter of pots and pans. Wormtail's in the kitchen. He didn't see that. And if he had, she'd _Obliviate_ him. And curse him for good measure, after a short rest.

Tamara pulls the door open and breathes in the misty morning skies.

* * *

A realisation strikes her as the Little Hangleton cemetery ghosts into view through the mist:

Cedric died not a hundred feet away. Not two weeks ago.

A sudden wave of self-loathing steals the air from her lungs. Tom killed Cedric. Harry watched his senseless death. And she hadn't even thought to retrieve the body, to inform someone.

Just left him to rot.

She couldn't have done anything. She had no control over Tom's actions. Had she been herself, Cedric would never have died. She isn't to blame.

What consolation would the body be? It was just an empty cadaver, a morbid echo of the former Cedric, from the moment that the killing curse tore his soul from it.

She could get it now. Send it back for a proper burial. She could... send up sparksNobody would see them. ApparateToo dangerous. PortkeyShe can't make one-

Portkey.

The cup. The cup was supposed to Portkey the champions back to the maze's entrance. Dismantling a Portkey is near-impossible without triggering it first, so Barty must have applied a new Portus on top of the existing one.

Which would mean that the cup is a Portkey to Hogwarts.

That could be usef _DON'T._

Incensed at the darkly pragmatic turn her thoughts just took, Tamara shunts the gate open with maybe a little more force than necessary, and it bounces off the stone wall it's hinged to.

The cup is still where Harry and Cedric left it, courtesy of Wormtail's continued muggle-repellant charm. And Cedric, in turn, is where Harry left him.

His death is clean, even after so long. Most witches and wizards die with their magic a writhing frenzy of fear and anguish, and their formless magic scatters into the environment. But the Killing Curse removes the soul before the magic can lose form, so Cedric's tranquil magic lingered to place his body in a sort of stasis, untouched by the elements. It hasn't even gone through rigor mortis yet.

There was a time when Tom pursued the Killing Curse as a show of mercy. He would have used it to assassinate key targets without unnecessary bloodshed; clean, painless, dignified.

She stares, and Cedric stares back, unblinking and unseeing.

Tamara sees no mercy.

She conjures a simple wooden coffin and levitates him inside. The lid slams shut with eerie finality.

She brings Harry's wand up with a swish and a flick to levitate the cup above the coffin. With Cedric's magic still clinging to the surroundings, the cup will activate the moment it touches the coffin.

Steeling herself, she murmurs a _Finite_ , and Cedric's resting place vanishes into the mist.

In the end, Cedric won.

After all, he brought the cup home with him.

Cedric's body long since departed, she finally snaps from her melancholy trance.

The fog has thinned a little, and the cloud-covered hint of a sun is high in the sky by now, and the spellwork took a lot out of her, but that doesn't mean she's willing to waste today away.

Tamara has a bus to catch.

* * *

The bus is a whiplash of emotions. The muggles pay no heed to her. They go about their days as usual, ignorant of the corpse she sent to Hogwarts less than an hour ago. Reading the news, staring out the window or chatting amongst themselves.

"You seem pale, dear," says someone from next to her. "Is everything alright?"

Tamara turns in surprise to find a slender middle-aged lady gazing worriedly at her. She must have sat down at the previous stop.

"I-" she stumbles, fumbling with the rucksack on her knee, searching for something to say. In the end, she just nods helplessly. "I just feel a little sick, is all," she lies. Mostly. Tom never did well with muggle transport.

The lady's face radiates sympathy, eyes twinkling. Something in Tamara tenses. "Oh, I have something that should help." She rummages in her felt handbag for a moment, pulling out a long packet of something which she presents to Tamara. "I always find that sucking on a mint helps with travel sickness."

Rattled, Tamara hesitantly takes the offered mint with a murmured 'thank you'. She discreetly taps it with her wand and whispers a diagnostic charm, making a show of reading the word etched into it: 'mild'.

The charm comes up negative. Satisfied that the mint isn't poisoned, she places it gingerly on her tongue.

Tom always knew that there was something about magic which inherently repulsed muggles, drove them to shun witches and wizards, to turn up their noses at the merest hint of magic. Harry never really put the pieces together, attributing them to the slander that the Dursleys always put out, but the fact remains that there was no muggle, not a one, who ever saw either of them and then had any semblance of a positive influence on their lives.

Teachers ignored them, children bullied or feared them, caretakers spread baseless rumours about them. It's something that Tom always took as gospel: muggles fear magical people on an instinctual level. It was a founding principle of Tom's ideals, before everything went...

Dark Lord-shaped.

But as the minutes pass and Tamara's churned-up stomach begins to settle, she concludes that this kind old lady is somehow an exception.

Tamara draws her holly wand and pretends to inspect it, side-eyeing the lady. She must be a witch, yet she merely watches curiously, making no indication that she recognises the wand for what it is. The wand-tip lights up, and her face shows misplaced understanding, apparently identifying it as something that makes sense. Perhaps a toy, or an oddly-shaped flashlight.

Even a squib would recognise a wand when they see it.

She's just a muggle.

Then why is she so kind in the face of magic?

The lady leaves the bus soon after, at the edge of Great Hangleton, and Tamara spends the rest of her journey all too aware of the empty seat next to her.

Finally, the bus arrives at central Great Hangleton, and Tamara makes her way to the front and pays the fare. She could just Confund the driver, but she's already used enough magic today to make her feel somewhat sluggish and fatigued, and the _Confundus_ is a reasonably intensive spell.

As she steps off the bus, she scans the various buildings lining Hangleton Corrugate. Most of them are shops, reminiscent of Diagon in their warmth and character - imperfect, rough around the edges and disparate, as if the street was built upon over and over again throughout the years. Many of the buildings seem to fold out onto the sidewalk which Tamara supposes is how the street got its name, and some have awnings extending far enough to even shelter the road.

There's the occasional dirty-white, overly-modern sign, and sometimes a boarded-up eyesore of a facade, but even those barely detract from the chaotic, almost free-for-all aesthetic of the Corrugate as a whole.

She certainly wouldn't be surprised if she found magicals living here.

Shaking herself from her reverie, Tamara amends her goals for the day. Of course books are a priority, but there's that little store on the corner, Wear and Care Clothing, and she does need some non-transfigured, correctly-fitted clothes. Some stationary from Clip's Paper wouldn't go amiss, either.

There's a cafe too, with seats and tables stretching across the entire road beneath one of the biggest awnings on the entire street. A car meanders past, ignorant of the blockage, and the entire setup - including an elderly man sipping his morning coffee - seems to bend impossibly out of the way.

In fact, pretty much every shop with a big enough shelter out the front causes a similar effect. Not always identical though - some trunks a few doors down simply jump over approaching cars, while the robed mannequins outside Wear and Care bend the _cars_ out of the way.

She can't help but grin at the sight.

* * *

In the end, she's forced to buy a trunk to contain everything that she bought, and it's only when she realises how far across the sky the sun is, that she drags it over to Which Brews, the cafe she saw earler, for a meal and a drink before her departure.

She orders a small coffee, tea and cola; a frankly delicious cheese ploughman's sandwich; and a Neapolitan ice cream with three chocolate brownies to finish up. After all, she has new tastebuds to test out, and with Wormtail cooking, her meals so far have only been the bare essentials.

(Come to think of it, Harry could actually cook. She'll have to go food shopping tomorrow and see if that counterbalances Tom's hopelessness with an oven.)

Of the three ice cream flavours, Harry's favourite was the strawberry, but he also liked the vanilla and chocolate. Tom preferred chocolate, but he was extremely picky about the quality, and he usually bought higher-class ice cream (among other things) to appear more wealthy to the other Slytherins.

Tamara loves the strawberry, but she's not a fan of the vanilla, and what little (high-quality) chocolate she tries makes her feel ill. How odd.

The brownies are a surprise - Tom liked them and Harry never tried them, but to Tamara they're little cubes of warm, melty heaven. They're definitely a highlight of the day.

As for the drinks... Well, no part of Tamara ever liked fizzy drinks, and that trend continues. The coffee _smells_ every bit as good as Tom remembers, but that's about the best thing she can say about it. The tea's nice though.

With the final bite of brownie, she's ready to leave for the day. Picking up the handled end of her new trunk, Tamara's mind drifts to her new possessions contained within.

Ironically, most of it is non-magical. For all that the Corrugate gives the distinct impression of deep magical-muggle integration, it has surprisingly few magical items for sale. Most of the magical storefronts are just additions to otherwise-muggle shops, selling versions of the shop's usual wares with minor magical enhancements. Tamara really has no use for a self-whisking mechanical egg beater, when she could accomplish the same with a wand.

She did get a few potions books and basic ingredients, since she still has a cauldron in the graveyard and doesn't have many potions memorised, but the books that someone her age might buy are too basic to actually teach her anything. Most of the books she feels are worth reading are well out of her price range and/or extremely suspicious for a preteen to buy.

No, the truly interesting books were in the muggle sections.

On a whim, she extracts a book called _Modern Enchantments: Producing Magic from the Mundane_ from the trunk's front pocket. From the introductory chapter, it's a wizard's (witch's, she corrects) guide to electronics and how they can achieve magic-like effects using only non-magical interactions. Still in the muggle section since it frames the magical world as a sort of metaphor (and there's a magical version to read by tapping the book with a wand), but definitely aimed towards witches attempting to survive the muggle world.

_Modern Enchantments_ is perhaps the most egregious book she bought, but it's far from the only one. All non-fiction - she thinks it's the Tom in her that considers fiction an unacceptable waste of time and money - but with topics ranging from the very-useful-if-it-does-what-it-says ( _Time-Up, a Guide to Productivity_ ), to the pure-whimsy-fulfilment ( _Amazing Art Attack Stuff with Neil Buchanan_ ). The latter she only relents on because she's not sure how her magic will react otherwise.

Besides the many books and ingredients, she also bought a small handheld device called a Game Boy, since there's a chapter for that in _Modern Enchantments_. It's a little like a tiny, interactive television, and she can't help but wonder if maybe the people who made it were secretly magical. Otherwise, how in the world could they have crammed so many functions into such a small box? The last television Harry saw, less than a year ago, was a hulking great thing that needed multiple people just to move it!

What is she forgetting... oh yes, the clothes, all from Wear and Care. A well-fit school uniform to walk around during weekdays - with a knee-length skirt this time, as uncomfortable as it makes her, since she _is_ female now; a simple tee, shorts and trainers, for weekends; a set of indoor robes from the wizarding section; and a set of silken pyjamas, with... cute acorns(?) on them.

Satisfied that her haul will keep her (her _magic_ ) entertained for the time being, Tamara wheels her new trunk over to the bus stop.

As she realises three stops later: the wrong bus stop. It's fortunate that the driver simply chuckles and allows her to switch buses.

He's a muggle too. And he may have just impacted history more than he'll ever realise.

* * *

Well this is... Something.

The particularly fluffy barn owl - she thinks she might recognise it from Harry's limited time in the Hogwarts owlery - flies out through the window without a second glance, leaving Tamara alone in Riddle House's master bedroom with... a letter.

Wormtail is the only one who even knows of her existence.

A _letter_?

The name on the front is hopelessly garbled, as if somebody attempted to write several names on top of each other. Alarmingly, she thinks she can make out _'Marv_ ' somewhere in the middle; the P and double-t of _'Potter_ '; and what is very clearly either _'Tom_ ' or _'Tam_ ' at the beginning; if she squints hard enough. But perhaps that's simply because she expects to find them.

It's addressed to _'The Master Bedroom, Riddle House, Little Hangleton'_.

Shaking hands turn the letter over. And if the acid green lettering or the unreasonably specific address didn't make it clear enough, the coat of arms stamped into the wax seal certainly do.

It's a Hogwarts letter.

Her first thought is Harry's fifth year booklist. It's possible that the wards still recognise Tamara as Harry Potter, especially since she hasn't yet thought up a new surname to fully separate her identity from her previous selves. But if that were the case, if the wards think she's Harry, wouldn't the letter be addressed only to him? Surely the same identifier wards would be used for delivery and address-

Just _open_ it!

The wax seal pops off as cleanly as it always does.

_'Dear [names written on top of each other],_

_We are pleased to inform you that you have a place at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry...'_

It's...

An acceptance letter?

Tamara glares at it. Claps her hands to her cheeks, hard. Waves Harry's wand over it, muttering every cancellation charm and disenchantment she can remember. Does the same with Tom's wand.

Nothing.

She holds it to a bright _Lumos,_ and a shadow of the Hogwarts crest blocks the light shining through. It seems legitimate.

Brow creased, she reads it through again, mulling it over.

It isn't the muggle-born version of the letter, with extra information surrounding the magical world, which is intriguing. Perhaps the wards sense traces of Harry's or Tom's wizarding bloodlines; that would explain why Harry received the wizarding-relatives version despite being muggle-raised. Tom got the muggle-born version despite his ancestry, but his letter was hand-delivered from the beginning, so it was likely prepared manually, with actual thought given to his circumstances.

So the castle presumably sees Tamara as a non-muggle-born. Likely either some vague fusion of Harry's and Tom's bloodlines; or possibly as Harry and Tom's _child_ , which is just weird.

Oh dear sweet Merlin, she just got an invitation to _Hogwarts_. She'd be right under Dumbledore's nose!

She could just go to another school. Hell, with Tom's memories she doesn't even _need_ school beyond the qualifications, which she can get just by taking the OWLs.

She doesn't have much money, but it's enough to get by. And if not, well, she _is_ part Dark Lord. Stealing food is hardly going to damage her conscience any more than the mass-murder already did.

It's tempting. Hogwarts is _home_ , and there's so much she missed the first two times. But it isn't safe to be so close to the headmaster. Or in the school, judging by Harry's past four years. Even _Tom's_ education wasn't that perilous, and he unleashed a _basilisk_!

She tosses the letter aside with a sigh, picking herself up off the bed. She needs a shower and a think, and Wormtail needs to make dinner.

"Wormtail, to me!" she calls, trying not to sigh at the somewhat melodious tone the command naturally takes. Voldemort's speech patterns don't lend themselves well to Tamara's voice, but she needs to keep up the charade.

In front of the rat, she is Lord Voldemort.

Wormtail doesn't answer.

Wormtail's gone.

Riddle House explodes into shards of shattered glass.


	2. Chapter 2

Fear and rage war in Tamara's chest as she systematically strips down everything in the newly-windowless Riddle House, muttering (non-magical) curses under her breath.

Wormtail's gone missing. Usually she'd just wait for him to return, but the slight buzz-under-the-skin of his wards is conspicuously absent. He took them down.

He isn't coming back.

At best, he finally decided that he was safest _away_ from the murderous Dark Lord - never mind that the worst Tamara's done since the ritual was that one Stinging Hex (though admittedly she'd very much like to gut him with the handle-end of a wand, so perhaps his fear is justified) - and went to live in a burrow somewhere. At worst...

At worst, he went to Dumbledore and offered information in exchange for his safety and security.

Tamara is _not_ taking that chance. Even if Wormtail didn't go to Dumbledore specifically, having her location known to anyone is bound to get her killed.

How DARE he?!

The doors rattle dangerously on their hinges, and she sucks in a deep, calming breath. She needs to save what little magic she can still muster for the ordeal ahead.

Thankfully Voldemort had about as much trust in the rat as she does, so he didn't have access to anything valuable. The last £500 she has leftover from the Riddles' stockpile is packed into her trunk alongside everything else. It isn't enough to get any permanent shelter over her head, but Tamara has magic, she'll manage.

She drags the trunk back down the stairs, riding the edge on the skirting board like a makeshift railroad to avoid bumping it on the steps, and marking the walls with streaks of black in the process. She isn't staying here; there's no need to keep it looking pretty. She just needs to be fast.

As she wrenches the trunk out through the front door, she casts a mournful look in the kitchen's direction. What a waste of an oven. Perhaps she could pick it up at some point later on.

After a few hair removal spells on the house (forensics is one of Polyjuice's lesser-known uses; the hairs lose their magic after a while, but better safe than sorry) and a levitation charm on the few things she can't fit in her trunk, she's ready to go.

She doesn't bother locking up. In fact she's tempted to level the building, to obscure any evidence she might have left behind. But again, ritual sickness, so she can't.

Trying to ignore the thumping in her temples, she turns away from the house and towards Little Hangleton Graveyard.

The muggle-repellant charm is gone, but the cauldron is still here. That isn't exactly why she's come here, but if she can take it with her it could be very useful.

Tamara loads her trunk and the levitated things into the cauldron, grabs onto the rim, braces herself and twists into nonexistence with a crack.

That was...

That... was some work.

Tamara tries to pick herself up off the ground, but her arms are shaking too much to support herself. Instead she temporarily accepts her fate and lies back on the cold, springy grass, her exhaustion draining slowly into the soil below.

The cauldron looks like it survived the Apparition. She can't see the things inside.

She'll sort it out a little later. For now... she'll ju

* * *

He awakens to something cold below his left eye.

...No. _She_ awakens. Ugh, she thought she was getting better about that.

Groaning, Tamara wipes the raindrop off her face. It's too ear-

Oh, Hell. Rain.

Suddenly she's much more awake, wiping the sleep out of her eyes and pushing herself up to look around.

She and her things are lain out in a clearing in the middle of a small forest - presumably the one she spied on the bus, not too far from Hangleton Corrugate, which is where she was aiming.

That's good. It should mean that nobody has come by and seen her.

The Apparition went well. She was expecting a small splinch at the very least (Tom tended to lose eyelashes, and he actually splinched an entire eye out on one particularly gruesome trip), but it looks like she was able to draw enough of the graveyard's latent magic - a combination of Cedric's dispersed spellpower and Wormtail's collapsed charm - to make up for her poor condition, the extra weight of her belongings and the awkward half-twist she used.

With any luck, using the environmental magic should also have been enough to mask her Apparition from being tracked with any accuracy.

The patter of rain brings her thoughts skywards. The sky grows darker with each passing minute and towering clouds loom overhead, threatening to burst.

She needs shelter.

Designed for human rituals or not, the cauldron isn't quite big enough to contain Tamara plus her things. That's fine though; cauldrons can't be transfigured without ruining their brewing potential, but charms are another matter. Once she's turned out its contents and scrubbed it shiny, a simple (well, not _simple_ , but not magically-intensive either) interior expansion charm makes it big enough, and then she can just levitate the whole thing and drop it down over herself.

A cushioning charm for comfort; a transparency spell so she has a window to tell the time; a few security spells so muggles can't see her and wizards can't track her so easily; and she's lying comfortably - if sleepily - on the gentle curved slope inside a giant cauldron, her every worldly possession sat on the small circular patch of grass created by the cauldron's opening.

Somehow it reminds her of primary school PE, and those odd rainbow-coloured parachutes that the children would do group activities with, tossing softballs around and sitting underneath it.

She can live like this for a bit...

...It's actually kind of cozy.

Wait. She waves her holly wand. Okay _now_ it's kind of cozy. Now that she won't _suffocate in her sleep_. That could have been awful.

And speaking of sleep...

* * *

As the rain drums a metallic beat in the early hours of the morning, Tamara is forced to admit that Tom's bookishness and Harry's impatience do not play nicely together.

It's a constant tug-of-war: read a few paragraphs, play Tetris for a few minutes, rinse and repeat. Whenever she isn't mindlessly tapping buttons or devouring an entire chapter that caught her eye, Tamara simultaneously curses the reading time lost to this infernal device, and laments that she can't justify spending _all_ her time on the Game Boy.

She sees tetrominos whenever she blinks now.

In a way though, it's handy. Whenever her head gets too full, she can process the information as she drops lines into place, piece by piece. And once she feels the call of the book again, she can return to it knowing that she's actually retaining everything she reads.

No more retreading the same sentences over and over to get them to stickNo more procrastinating for hours on end! Now she can procrastinate _and_ retread at the same time, both in moderation! Which probably isn't much better!

She's glad she read some of _Modern Enchantments_ before the Game Boy ran out of power - without an electrical socket, _Fulgur Continebat_ is the only method she has of charging it.

Hogwarts should teach that. Not that it would be of any use since-

Oh, Tamara forgot all about Hogwarts. It was kind of overshadowed by the whole 'moving house to a cauldron' thing she has going on now.

She waits for the panic to set in... but it doesn't. Harry's influence.

Good, she can work with that.

Okay, the most pressing issue is the garbled name on the acceptance letter. Nobody would trust a name written like that at face value, and if they delve too deep they might figure things out. She needs to sort it out before someone decides to actually read the letters they're sending. Or worse, the enrolment register.

Thankfully, she's pretty sure that only the muggle-born letters get looked at (otherwise _the Cupboard Under the Stairs_ would have gotten far more attention), so she has until Hogwarts proper to figure out a surname and start thinking of herself in terms of that, more than as HaTomrry.

Her mind drifts back to the Corrugate. Tamara Corrugate has a nice ring to it, she thinks, and she certainly likes the theming. Being named after a place instead of a person almost guarantees that the name is unique as well.

But it could draw attention back to the Corrugate, which is the last thing she wants when she's living in a cauldron nearby. It's sad since she's had half a mind on it since getting the letter, but she has to conclude that it isn't worth the risk.

She still likes the theming though. Like her first name, she just needs to pick something distant enough that nobody would connect the two.

Concertina is her first thought, oddly enough. She's preeeetty sure it means something similar to Corrugate. After Voldemort though, she's had enough of using French pseudonyms that she doesn't fully understand.

Cardboard is next, and that's immediately out. It's just so... dry.

Origami... Tamara very clearly isn't Japanese, so that's out. Crease. No, that doesn't sound right. Fold, then? No, that's weak. Tamara does not Fold.

She flips the pages of Art Attack, a word on the tip of her tongue that she can't quite think of. An odd method of cutting only part-way through paper with a knife, so that it folds easier. It fits too, in a macabre sort of way; Tamara has a history of cutting into people and making them fold.

Ah, there it is. Score. Tamara Score?

...No. No, screw it. She was always gonna be Tamara Corrugate. Nobody will chalk it up to anything more than coincidence anyway.

* * *

The cauldron has undergone some renovations in the past few days. She's quite proud of her handiwork, honestly.

She's flipped the cauldron back the right way up, and buried the bottom third of it into the earth. In the heavily-expanded interior, the bottom third is comprised of solid wood, leaving a flat floor at the cost of a tiny bit of headroom, not that Tamara's really tall enough to want for space.

Sighing in pride as she gives the room another once-over - the 'kitchen' is just a few rocks and the 'bed' is nothing more than a blanket, but she'll manage - she kicks her hollowed-out tree-stump stool back under the vague semblance of a desk.

The hardest parts were actually the most easily-overlooked: the ladder leading up and out of the cauldron (which she still doesn't fully trust to hold her weight), and the circular trapdoor that it leads to. She'll need to replace them both at some point, but they'll hold out for a week or two before then.

It's better than any assembly-line muggle house, at any rate.

* * *

The next Hogwarts letter Tamara gets, addressed to _'Tamara Corrugate, The Room, A Cauldron, Some Woods'_ , is a mere reminder to give correspondence before the first of September.

Or as the letter says: _'We await your owl'_.

She can't buy an owl for the sole purpose ofWill Hedwig recognise her?

Thrown by the out-of-the-blue question, Tamara takes a moment to gather her thoughts, ignoring the vague dread that creeps in at the thought of Hedwig recognising hernot recognising her.

Which would be worse?

...

She recalls surprisingly little of Tom's experiences in the magical world. He was just out of Hogwarts when he became Lord Voldemort. Everything after that is fragmented, and everything prior is based on interactions with rich pure-bloods, who had family owls. Harry's memories are similarly limited, since he wasn't particularly explorative back when he... existed.

Two people just stopped existing one day.

Tamara shakes herself. Surely there must be some kind of owl postage service, like the Hogwarts Owlery. Diagon might have one in the pet shop. Or the Corrugate might have one somewhere.

Diagon's the best bet. After all, it's the go-to place for school shopping, and it isn't like _every_ family has an owl of their own to use. Tamara doesn't know how many people know that the Corrugate exists, but running post from there likely wouldn't be worth it for a business owner.

Still, the Corrugate is closer, so she'll check there first.

She still isn't certain that Hogwarts is a good idea - now more than ever, now that she has the beginnings of a home to return to. But the Hogwarts tuition grant makes money a non-issue there, and lodging plus food for the majority of the year is hardly anything to sneeze at. She's isn't yet powerful enough to provide for herself.

That Barty successfully impersonated one of Dumbledore's closer friends for the majority of a year is simultaneously calming and worrying. Calming because clearly Hogwarts' security isn't all it's made out to be. Worrying because so soon after the fact, Dumbledore will inevitably be on the lookout for anything amiss.

But Tamara isn't something that she herself, so experienced in soul magic, can explain. Perhaps Dumbledore might suspect Polyjuice or the Imperius upon meeting her, but both investigations would turn up short. For the former she can just avoid carrying around suspicious drinks, and the latter would paint Tamara as an innocent victim rather than a mastermind, even were there circumstantial evidence to suggest it.

So long as she doesn't draw attention to herself, _nobody_ would believe that the decade-dead spirit of Lord Voldemort and his teenage arch-nemesis accidentally merged to form a semi-functional (though perhaps that's giving herself too much credit) pre-teen girl. That just isn't the kind of thing that happens, magic be damned.

Besides, the castle is home, unlike the Dursleys or the orphanage ever were. And the Diadem is by far the least risky Horcrux to check up on, that she knows of.

Food, shelter, protection, information, connections and eventually qualifications. All things she needs to survive the future, and all things that Hogwarts will provide.

So long as she keeps her head down, she'll be fine.

She hopes.

* * *

Buying food fresh is surprisingly good for the budget, Tamara thinks with a smile as she begins cutting the blanched tomatoes. The chopped onion and crushed garlic sizzle happily away in olive oil on the flat, spell-heated rock she's using in lieu of a hob, the only magic she's cast today.

She isn't sure how hot the hob needs to be, so today's dinner is a recipe that Harry saw once in a students' healthy eating cookbook - simple, difficult to mess up and according to the book, adaptable to pretty much any extra ingredients she may wish to toss in.

Well, the ragu sauce is. The pasta itself is just store-bought tortelloni. Perhaps she'll change that when her budget's secure enough to buy another cookbook.

The chopped tomatoes and some of their juice - she's not sure about the juice, but hopefully she can just boil it off if the consistency turns out wrong - go into the pot on top of the browning onions, and the sizzle is replaced with a low bubble as she mixes them together. With canned tomatoes the recipe calls for at least half an hour of simmering but preferably more, so she'll probably leave it for forty minutes or so with fresh ones.

That done, she pulls up her trunk to sit on and switches on her Game Boy for some entertainment, looking up occasionally to check the sauce's progress and stir.

Cooking is much more interesting when she's the one reaping the meal afterwards. It smells _beautiful_!

...She forgot the basil. And the pepper.

Sighing, she adds the missing ingredients, plus some halved olives (for a salty twist, she supposes, but really she just did it on a whim) and twists an extra five minutes onto the kitchen timer.

Forty minutes later, she sits down to eat a double-helping of pasta.

Tamara's no connoisseur, but to her it tastes like victory.

* * *

Most of the summer passes in a somewhat lazy blur of Tetris, books, cooking and the occasional shopping trip to the Corrugate - turns out there isn't an owlery there, so Diagon's a priority now. If she had a choice she'd be working herself to the bone daily - inactivity doesn't sit right with her - but she can't do much more than she is with her current budget, and she owes it to herself to relax.

So she relaxes. But she's not going to be happy about it.

By the tail-end of July, she's actually doing fairly well for herself - between buying fresh and getting the occasional discount by virtue of being a child and therefore pitiful (a sentiment that makes her violently angry, but one she unfortunately needs to take advantage of), she can't have spent more than £50 of her £500 stockpile.

Unfortunately, even with the Hogwarts grant, most of the remainder will go towards school supplies.

She isn't too worried about that; once she's at Hogwarts, her options will be far more open. She'll be able to rummage through the Room where Everything's Hidden, for one. She'll have ample time, space and access to SeveSnaperus' - close enough - potions supplies, too, so even assuming the Room is devoid of anything of value, she'll be able to brew potions for some extra galleons.

She originally planned to hit Diagon on the 31st, but that's Harry's birthday so the lookout for him will likely be more alert than usual. The 29th and 30th are a weekend and any later doesn't leave much time for unexpected circumstances, so it's Friday the 28th of July that she eventually decides on.

Tamara's unwilling to try Apparating again - even without the extra baggage of the cauldron this time, Apparition is draining (not to mention the distance), and consciousness is an unfortunate prerequisite for shopping.

She's nowhere near London so she can't call the Knight Bus, and even if she could, she had struggles with a _non-magical_ bus; she'd prefer her expertly-cooked meals to remain in her stomach, thanks.

She instead Disillusions herself, twirls on the spot for a little self-indulgence, and kicks off into the air in a single fluid motion.

Semi-familiar excitement and power rush over her, and she can't help the slightly manic grin twisting her face.

It's effortless. For all that she knows how Flight works - essentially converting her yew wand into a wand-sized broomstick, since direct self-levitation is theoretically impossible - the magic is her own. There's control there, a connection that a broom's magic, broken away from its spellcaster, could never hope to match.

It feels less that she's flying; more that she simply isn't falling. She just drifts along, and with the slightest inclination, she is where she wants to be.

The flight to open road is peaceful. Cars pass beneath her and she matches their speeds on the winding streets, making her way in the general direction of the A1. Once she's there, she gently touches down on a southbound grocery delivery truck and lies belly-down, watching the trees and the fields fly past, half an eye turned ahead for low-hanging signs.

(How this is less nauseating than a bus ride is beyond her, but she tries not to think too hard about it.)

The exhaustion creeps in again as she casts a sticking charm, but she's too giddy to let it best her.

Some three-and-a-half hours (and a couple _Impervius_ charms, and three vehicle transfers) later, she finally spots a landmark that confirms beyond a doubt that she's made it to London: an Underground sign. Specifically, Hendon Central Station, which means... absolutely nothing to her.

She hops off the blue Ford Escort and lands safely on the pavement with a burst of Flight. Smiling to herself, she heads inside the Station and locates the nearest map of the Underground.

...Dear Merlin, _what_? This looks like an Astronomy chart! Why's the index so long? It could fill a leaflet!

How do the muggles get anywhere like this?

...Right, the Leaky Cauldron is on... Charing Cross, was it? She looks it up on the index - which fills the same amount of space as the map, she can't help but notice.

D5. Coordinates?

What's with all the grey and white numbers? Why are there no letters?

Oh, the little blue ones on the edges of the paper are the ones she should be looking at. D5 is... there. South of Kings Cross.

So that's where Tamara wants to be, now where is she?

...What was this Station called again?

* * *

Finally.

After all these years.

Charing Cross is beautiful. Normally she wouldn't care to notice, but after more than an hour of zero personal space, ear-rending noise and being forced to take the Bakerloo line after somehow ending up in _Elephant and Castle_ of all places...

She's just glad to be done with the whole experience.

The muggles who designed this cesspit were dark lords in another life, she's convinced, and the ones who ride it daily must be entirely and utterly insane.

She breathes deeply, revelling the freedom of movement she always took for granted and resolving to never do so again.

She's Apparating from now on, damn the consequences.

The Leaky Cauldron is as welcoming as ever. The barkeep - she refuses to refer to him by name - seems concerned to see an eleven-year-old without an adult, but he waves her through without much fuss once she mentions something vague about 'the orphanage'. She isn't really awake enough to pay herself much attention.

The barkeep taps the right brick for her, and the wall folds away into the streets of Diagon.

Despite the welcoming scenery, Tamara's neck prickles unpleasantly; she's all too aware how utterly exposed she is here. She has to stop herself from striding straight towards Gringotts - that'll just draw attention and get her mugged. Instead, she takes a more sedate pace, trailing barely within mistaken-for-family-distance of a dark-haired couple and their son, pretending to be caught up peering through the various shops like any other magical child.

"Hey, kid." A hand taps her on the shoulder and she does _not_ shriek. She swivels on her heel _calmly_ , assessing the situation as she-

Okay yeah, she freaks out.

Flushed with embarrassment, she hurriedly lowers her holly wand - not the infamous yew one, thank mercy - as the sheepish auror on the other end of it lowers his own wand.

"Sorry about that, kid," the auror says, trying to slow his breathing with a hand to heart. "You give as good as you get, I'll tell you that much. I think I lost a _decade_..." Tamara's not sure what to say to that, so she straightens out her shorts in lieu of a reply. "Where are your guardians?" the auror asks gently.

Wordlessly, she points to the couple she was tailing, who don't seem to have noticed the disturbance.

The auror (she doesn't recognise him, on closer inspection) fixes her with a deadpan stare. "Alright, look at them closely. What are they wearing?"

She looks, nonplussed. "Robes."

"And what are you wearing?"

She looks down and bites back a curse. Tee and shorts. Muggle clothes, and she was following a wizarding family.

"Oops," she chuckles weakly.

The auror grins crookedly, suddenly very reminiscent of Sirius, and her heart twists oddly. "Yeah, oops. Tell you what, I'm an auror, and I don't need to be anywhere specific right now. How's about I come with you? No questions asked, okay?"

"Do you have a badge?"

Wordlessly, he pulls out his identification - Thomas Wulfric. It looks legitimate, for all that Tamara can tell, but that means nothing really. More telling is the ease with which he pulled it, and that he had it in the correct pocket.

She shuffles her feet in thought. He doesn't _seem_ to have ulterior motives, though she's been wrong before...

"...Okay," she relents. She can always slip away if he tries anything, and being with an auror makes her less of a target to others. That she, part-Voldemort, doesn't recognise him means he probably isn't a Death Eater at the very least.

"I'm Tamara," she says as they start walking, hoping he'll reply in kind.

"I'm Thomas." Right, yeah, that was on his ID. Poor guy.

"That's a boring name," she blurts with truly dazzling tact, but he doesn't seem to mind. Instead, his grin turns outright conspiratorial.

"Nobody suspects a Thomas," he smirks, and she can almost see his point. "Tamara sticks out."

"Nobody messes with a Tamara," she counters, folding her arms with a huff. "Thomas doesn't command _respect_."

There's a pregnant pause.

Wha- is she _trying_ to blow her cover?!

Thomas just laughs it off, the git. "So why are you here anyway?" Really? He _just_ said he wouldn't pry! At her look, that crooked grin is back. "Okay, so I'm curious! It's not often you see a... what are you, twelve? Thirteen?"

"I'm eleven."

(She feels oddly gratified. Tom and Harry both looked young for their age. Perhaps it's the way she carries herself?)

"Not often you see an eleven year old walking around by themselves. Just starting Hogwarts then?" She nods. "And you already have a wand?"

Brief panic overtakes her. "It was my... father's," she says slowly. In her mind, things settle into place: a muggle mother, a wizarding father, she lives in a muggle town hence the clothes. Does any of that contradict? "He's gone." She rubs at her eyes, pressing them a bit to make them tear up and really sell it.

It seems to work.

The rest of the trip passes in silence as Tamara works through the beginnings of a backstory in her head. At some point she took Thomas' hand, which is convenient when she trips over the first step up to Gringotts.

"Not a word," she hisses to a silently-chuckling Thomas as he pulls her back into position.

"I didn't say anything!"

But his face says it all.

* * *

The bulk of the trip passes uneventfully. Thomas' presence is a double-edged sword as she can't make some of the requests to the goblins that she wants under his supervision, but he does remove much of the tedium of obtaining the Hogwarts grant, so Tamara supposes it evens out. Her new school supplies are enough to curb her lingering disappointment.

It's the same old stuff as always, of course. The standard stationary, the standard equipment, the standard books alongside whatever the Defense teacher assigned for the year-

_Defensive Magical Theory?!_ As a textbook! For learning with! Who the actual ever-loving FUCK approved this?!

Oh, Tamara knows this book well. Very well, indeed. It was the one that Tom searched for the longest when he still had his eyes set on the Defense spot, and he figured the best way to prepare was to devour everything even remotely related.

It had been recommended by someone whose name escapes her this moment, who swore by the thing, yet didn't offer him a copy.

It would be three days before he began to understand how rare the blasted thing was.

It would be half a decade before he finally extracted a copy from the darkest pits of Hell, and instantly realised why.

It's strange that Tamara doesn't remember the name of the person who recommended it, because said name became Tom's most vehement of swear words for a time, reserved for only the most truly life-ruiningly, mind-meltingly awful of scenarios.

She wishes she remembered the name, so she could yell it right this instant at the top of her lungs.

* * *

It takes several minutes (and a visit to Fortescue's, courtesy of Thomas) to calm down.

"So Tamara, you wanna explain that outburst?"

She mulishly sinks her face into her mint-chocolate-chip cone (almost as good as strawberry), because apparently the only word that escaped her mouth in her incandescent rage was an extraordinarily incensed 'FUCK!', and the manager of Flourish and Blotts didn't take kindly to that.

"Don't like that book," she summarises sullenly.

"I figured that much," he laughs. Tamara wishes she had something besides precious ice-cream to hurl in his face. "What don't you like about it?"

"It's _stupid_!" she bursts, and the dam is broken. "It was such a rare book and they could've just let it die but they just _had_ to print a new edition, it just goes on and on about pacifism like that'll make the dark wizard with his wand trained on me reconsider his life choices and surrender! I refuse to learn Defence from the guy who believes casting a Protego is somehow analogous to beating your opponent's face in with an overpowered banisher!"

He chuckles. "Woah, you certainly speak from the heart. That could get you in trouble, you know."

"I just... Defense was my father's passion, and that was easily the worst book he had," Tamara dreams up on the spot. "He hammered a nail through it just so I wouldn't have to read it."

"And you did anyway?"

"It was awful."

Thomas drops into silence at that remark, a silence that lasts all too long.

Her eyes are drawn to the table. Wooden chairs and table, fairly heavy. She could slip underneath and Apparate out, and he couldn't do anything about it-

"Look, you're a smart kid," Thomas decides. " _Too_ smart for some people. So here's a warning: Keep your head down. You wear your heart on your sleeve and that's good, but there's a time and place for it and that isn't in Hogwarts. Not this year. Alright?"

Tamara's mouth doesn't work for a moment.

"...Alright," she says finally.

They both know she doesn't mean it.

"Just be careful then," he settles on.

* * *

They silently agree to drop the incident, and soon enough they're at the last store of the trip: Ollivander's.

Thomas stays outside. Tamara isn't sure why he's so willing to let her go it alone, but she's grateful nonetheless - there are three beings that Tamara dreads meeting the most, and Ollivander is one of them. She'd rather brave it alone.

The shop is as dark and misty, somehow, as she remembers, the heavy smell of wood hanging in the air.

She's shivering. In the middle of summer. She takes a deep breath in defiance, and lets the anxiety flow off her as best she can.

"Ah, I had wondered," Ollivander greets cryptically, stepping from the dust as if he were always there. Tamara sets her brow, very purposefully not reaching for her wands. A wandmaker would notice such a move in an instant.

"Yes yes," he's saying, "Yew and Phoenix feather, 13 and a half inches, dry and spongey. Incredible how it's aged so well, wands like that are difficult to maintain."

She's drawn her wand - she isn't sure which one - in a sudden bout of fear, but Ollivander doesn't seem to notice, rambling on in lieu of an appropriate reaction as he rummages through wand boxes. "Holly and the brother feather, 11 inches, nice and supple. Poorly-kept, last I saw it, yet content. How you earned them from their previous masters I haven't the foggiest, but they have chosen your allegiance, and so I know _precisely_ the wand for you...

You see, one day around a month ago, a particular Phoenix burst out afore me, and bestowed upon me not one, but two tail feathers - the smallest I've ever seen gifted, in fact. Phoenixes are smart, of course, smarter than to gift such unwieldy feathers without due cause, and so I crafted them into a single wand, worthy twice-over of its wielder. And what a marvel it is, truly."

With a little 'ah!' of success, he pulls a box and opens it, presenting the contents to her.

"Hawthorn and two Phoenix feathers, 12 inches, unbending. Well, go on, I daresay you know how this goes already."

Tamara stares at the stick uncomprehendingly. "...Which end do I hold?"

Ollivander's stare pierces her. "That is your choice. This is not an average wand. This wand houses a Phoenix feather in each end, both pointing outwards. Whichever way you wield it, it shall perform differently, yet remarkably all the same."

Dubiously, she takes the wand - an even foot long, near-perfectly cylindrical and mid-brown, with a short, pale handle on either end, barely raised from the surface of the wand itself.

She takes one end. It's almost like her holly wand, but brighter, shining less golden and more in pure white sunlight.

The other end is much the opposite - echoing her yew wand, only a moonlit orange instead of silvery. Dimmer, sleepier somehow.

Her lips curl a little, unbidden. Of all the metaphorical- a double-ended wand for a living antithesis. It's almost poetic.

And if her guess isn't off the mark... "Which Phoenix gave you the feathers?"

"I think you already know the answer to that, my dear," he replies, nodding to her hidden wands. "And who is the newest master of this trilogy?"

"Tamara Corrugate."

He grins, teeth glinting in the candle-light. "You will do great things, Miss Corrugate."

She raises her head, resolutely looking him in the eye, even as her gut twists in unease.

"I know," she says.

And it frightens her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You might notice some formatting differences in this one; I’m using the style of FFN as a base so it’s easier to post chapters to both sites at once.


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